Going back twenty years, Fox has spent a lot of time and money hiring people to go to London, Amsterdam and Rome search for the longer, five-and-a-half-hour version of Cleopatra, Schawn Belston admits. “We know that we don’t have it in our own archives but various collectors over the years have seen it, or ‘know a guy’…”

Belston is the senior vice president of library and technical services at Fox and his restoration projects are varied – from the film noir classic Night & the City to F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece Sunrise. Any eventual discovery of the even longer Cleopatra will probably be as unexpected and far-flung as another recent find. “It was one of the most amazing experiences an archivist can have, let alone a movie lover,” Belston recalls, “when someone calls and says we’ve found what we think is a John Ford film,” which is what happened in 2009 when researchers in the New Zealand Film Archive discovered a nitrate print of Ford’s lost 1927 silent film Upstream.

The special Cleopatra screening Tuesday at Cannes features the restored four hour, eight minute version Belston began working on two years ago. The apocryphal longer version of the 1963 historical epic would only have existed to show studio boss Darryl Zanuck and they haven’t found it yet, but what Fox did have was original camera negative for the 50th anniversary version (also out on DVD and Blu-ray this week).

But complicating matters is the fact that all of the trims and outs from negatives to make that lost longer version of the film had been warehoused but were finally destroyed years ago (by Fox itself, junked as a cost-saving measure), so there are no traditional outtakes to play with. But the package does include footage from the New York premiere, new commentary tracks and material like the short films “The Cleopatra Papers” and “The Fourth Star of Cleopatra.” The latter, a reel from 1963, refer to the grand, elaborate sets.

“Cleopatra is kind of a great example about how nothing really changes – everything we think is new isn’t,” Belston says of deleted scenes and promotional vignettes that today fill out DVDs as extra material. “There are sequences, like the snake dancers who are rehearsing – that was shot and is in the longer version but not in the shorter movie version.”

Cleopatra is kind of a great example about how noting really changes – everything we think is new isn’t

Authenticity is the keyword with regards to colour, contrast and other properties of the print. “We have the original camera negative, 65mm and that’s huge, it’s gorgeous,” Belston says. It’s faded and it’s damaged and it’s got lots of problems, too, that we can easily fix digitally now. The trick with Cleopatra was trying to maintain as much of the detail as possible,” he continues. Like her entrance, coming into Rome with Caesarion it’s amazing and we want to try and make sure when we’re restoring it that we want to try and capture, and not through our own digital manipulation, get rid of anything that’s inherent in the amazing detail captured in that scene.”

The audio of the Cleopatra restoration was worked on by a team of musicians. “You almost need a musical ear to do this kind of thing,” Belston explains. “For the original road show in ‘63 it would have been six track stereo and there would have been five screen channels: left, left centre, centre, right centre, right. It would have be magstriped onto the actual film on either side of the perf.”

Fox had the original magnetic print masters, and Belston’s team removed the clicks and hiss that had been copied into it at the time, then completely reconfigured the track for 5.1 surround sound. “You only have 3 screen channels now at home, and you have to spread the left-centre and the right-centre equally.” That involves listening to sound effects and music and how they are placed, or how the dialogue pans from left to right or right to left as the camera is moving and actor move around in the frame.

Belston is now working on one of his favourite movies, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine but since Fox has about fifty projects in the works at any given time, that’s in tandem with John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China. “But if you can find Murna’s Four Devils, I’ll drop everything and work on that!”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/queen-of-the-nile-inside-20th-century-foxs-restoration-of-cleopatra/feed0std10000961H303834.JPGCleopatra by the numbers: As the Elizabeth Taylor epic turns 50, we look back on its key facts and figureshttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/cleopatra-by-the-numbers-as-the-liz-taylor-turns-50-we-look-back-on-its-key-facts-and-figures
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/cleopatra-by-the-numbers-as-the-liz-taylor-turns-50-we-look-back-on-its-key-facts-and-figures#commentsSat, 18 May 2013 18:00:40 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=114865

In the Chinese zodiac, 2013 is the Year of the Snake. The snake was Cleopatra’s talisman and it is her year, too: it has been half a century since 20th Century Fox nearly went bankrupt from the staggering production costs of their historical epic version. Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert, Vivien Leigh and Monica Bellucci have all stepped into the role of the politically savvy seductress, but none captured the cunning queen of Egypt quite like the legendary Elizabeth Taylor, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 adaptation (a restored 50th anniversary edition DVD and Blu-ray is out next week and includes never-seen lost footage and commentary by Martin Landau among its featurettes). The newly restored original cut also premieres at Cannes and in select theatres next week.

IT HAPPENED HERE: In this occasional series, Dave Bidini unearths Toronto’s forgotten history: In 1964, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor announced they would be mounting a pre-Broadway run of Burton’s “Hamlet” at the O’Keefe Centre. Back then, this was all-consuming news, reflecting a place and a time still virgin to celebrity, and unsure how to behave in a time of star mania.

It was a big deal because they chose Toronto, which, back in 1964 — and maybe even now, at least sometimes — counted for lots. They were Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, parked in a five-room suite on the eighth floor of the King Edward hotel for a pre-Broadway run of Burton’s Hamlet, directed by Sir John Gielgud. The play would be staged at the O’Keefe Centre, now called the Sony Centre, and before that, the Hummingbird. But it used to be the O’Keefe. The Clash played there with The Undertones and The B Girls. Still, before that: Burton and Taylor. Hollywood marriage. British acting royalty. Star power. Screen power. And they were coming here. To our town. Just up the street from Sid Ceaser, doing Little Me and eating at the Steak Pit.

Newspapers screamed the news; radio stations wet themselves. The city couldn’t contain itself. The Toronto Star reported that “reservations were made at restaurants around town in the name of the two stars, but they were almost always prank calls.” Wait and kitchen staff were deployed to their full complement; blades were polished and recipes prepared to meet the two galacticos’ requests; but, inevitably, the extra charges were sent home. After arriving for rehearsals in late January, star sightings were reported daily. One Niagara Falls hotel said they’d reserved an entire floor for the duration of the play’s run in case Burton-Taylor needed a holiday furlough. Police told O’Keefe promoters they would divert the manpower necessary to protect the actors’ privacy. They’d close streets if they had to. They’d do whatever it took to make their time here special.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Ts5WMRWMY&w=620&h=349]

There were protests, as well; citizens outraged that the actors had taken up with each other despite being married to other people (if in dissolving relationships and impending divorces). Through all of this — and through rehearsals already wracked by Burton’s alcoholism and Taylor’s long shadow of narcissism — Gielgud wrote: “Ghastly crowds of morons besiege the hotel where Burton and Taylor are staying. Every drink and conversation is photographed and reported.” It was the birth of celebrity culture in Toronto; the likes of Ben Mulroney and MuchMusic’s zombie army having sprung from its loins.

Burton-Taylor sought peace, but this was untenable. And then, one night, they had it. The couple was spirited through the utilitarian service elevators and drafty back doors of the hotel into a car that drove north to Elm Street, to Barberian’s Steak House, across the street from the Art and Letters Club. Huddled in dark scarves and raised collars, they were spirited past an empty front room to the back of the steakhouse. Waiting for them were Hume Cronyn, John Gielgud, Nathan Cohen and Cohen’s wife. Their meal was consumed under cover of darkness while toasting their own unassailed celebrity. It was a good thing the couple — aging thirtysomethings, both of them — acknowledged this, because the next day everything would change. The Beatles would play Ed Sullivan and Taylor-Burton could soon move around as they pleased.

In the days before Spanx, women wore slinky, clingy — but not gut-sucking — slips for the prevention of static, for opacity and for a dress to fall more smoothly. Today, such artefacts seem a throwback to earthy ’50s bombshells like Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor, who famously wore a slip in her Academy Award-winning role as a call girl in Butterfield 8. More recently, Scarlett Johannson had a Broadway turn in another role that Taylor made indelible while wearing a slip — Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

While Spanx giveth, they also taketh away. And as any woman who has tried to buy a traditional half-slip or dress slip lately will have realized, they are an endangered species. The department store lingerie department should now more aptly be called the “shapewear” department: I tried to buy one a few months ago and all I found was an array of stretchy nude hosiery tubes hanging limply as far as the eye could see. The stalwart department clerk commiserated with me as I left empty-handed, resolved to find a source for this archaic underpinning.

Eventually, I found three, all made in Canada. As a basic underpinning to be worn under their sheer dresses and jersey collections (or just, you know, around the house for a glamorous take on housekeeping), Comrags makes a full slip with bust seams and a deep v-neck in stretchy black microfibre, and it is pitch-perfect ($95, comrags.com). For her label Dahlia Drive, Vancouver artist Wendy Van Riesen upcycles vintage nylon and polyester slips while adding modern verve with screen-printed graphics, dip-dyed tints and even hand-painting — the results of her latest inspiration, from Chagall’s Jerusalem windows, are just as lovely worn on their own as under a dress (from $150 at Starfire Gallery, Urbanity, Planet Claire and Tutta Mia in Vancouver, dahliadrive.com).

And for a real honey of a va-voom honeymoon, Toronto’s lingerie brand Fortnight has revived the look in all its glory with its lace-paneled slip ($168-%188, in red, ivory or black at Gravity Pope in Edmonton, Gravity Pope & LynnSteven in Vancouver, Simons in Laval, Quebec, St-Bruno and Montreal, L’Infinity in Nelson, Linea Intima, Secrets From Your Sister in Toronto and other boutiques, fortnightlingerie.com).

Elizabeth Taylor surpassed Michael Jackson as the highest-earning dead celebrity in the past year, with her estate pulling in US$210-million, much of it from the auction of her jewels, costumes and artwork, Forbes said on Wednesday.

Jackson, who died in 2009, dropped into second place with earnings of US$145-million, followed by Elvis Presley with US$55-million.

In addition to the Taylor auction, which totaled US$184-million, the actress, pictured, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, also earned US$75-million from sales of her top selling perfume White Diamonds. “The rest of the money came from property sales and residuals from Taylor’s movies,” according to Forbes. “After Cleopatra, the star smartly negotiated a 10% ownership in each of her films.”

The publication this month of actor Richard Burton’s private diaries has been terrific tabloid fodder, but the gossipy and revealing musings are also of particular interest to author Jess Walter.

Walter’s latest novel, Beautiful Ruins, casts Burton as a character in one of its two entwined narratives — the first set in modern Hollywood, the other in 1962 Italy, on the volatile Roman set of Cleopatra (or more accurately, skirting the edges of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans in a sleepy coastal village, nearby).

“To read those diaries, the wistful parts are what gets me,” Walter explains over the phone from his home in Spokane, Wash., in advance of his appearance at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto Oct. 28. “Imagining him older and aching so much for this woman [Elizabeth Taylor], they’re pretty powerful.”

As a writer, he is also intrigued by Burton’s cadence. “You can see the places that he came from and I think like any great actor, he was able to not so much inhabit other characters but to find his voice in other characters. So I think he had an amazing voice – I think he might have been a great writer if he hadn’t chosen to act.”

“Even as a fictional character I almost had trouble getting [Burton] back out of my novel, because he got in there and it was such a fun voice to write in,” he adds. “The great thing is that you really are creating a version — if you create Lincoln and he hunts zombies then you’re obviously creating a character that is separate from the real one.”

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Beautiful Ruins — its title taken from a phrase used to describe the self-destructive Welsh actor — evolved over the years from several strands of ideas Walter originally had back in 1997. He chose Italy in part, he says, because he and his wife had been on a “devastatingly romantic vacation” to Cinque Terre.

“Albergo Pasquale oddly enough was the name of the hotel,” he recalls. “I got a little card and stuck that in my wallet — it’s still in my wallet, the business card for Albergo Pasquale.”

Thus, the novel’s sweet-natured main character was named Pasquale, and is the owner of a failing hotel in a would-be resort town on the Ligurian coast. Walter, who visited in the desolate February off-season, knew what the town would feel like when it wasn’t thronged with tourists, and in the novel, writes of fictional Porto Vergogna as a similar resort area on the cusp of being glamorously “discovered.”

The character of the aspiring American starlet Dee Moray came out because Walter’s mother had recently died. “I had just gone through her letters and was struck by the fact that a woman her age didn’t have very many options — it was housewife or nothing, and so she married at 18. That was the first impulse.” That, and Fellini. Watching 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita, and getting a feel for the locale and period, Walter eventually stumbled into Cleopatra.

“It felt like such an important cultural moment,” Walter says. “Cleopatra is such a fascinating train wreck.” That the film eventually broke even on its astonishing budget was thanks the romantic scandal off-screen between Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Walter ascribes this birth of celebrity tabloid culture as a Hollywood marketing tool to the pair and, in the novel, to producer Michael Deane.

“It did feel as if I had taken some genetic strand all the way down to where the celebrity gene and where it comes from,” Walter says, who gave the oversimplified version of that theory to Deane, as part of the character’s pathology.

“There is a big impulse to blame the Kardashians or blame reality television, which is insane when those are the top-rated things,” Walter adds. (Kim Kardashian, coincidentally, regularly cites Taylor as her all-time icon.)”They can only reflect us back to people and the culture.”

Beautiful Ruins is written in several different modes and points of view, like that of Deane’s cynical production assistant Claire (who likens her idealistic bombastic boss to a shark: “even when it’s asleep it’s moving forward, it never stops swimming”) — and translating that feeling into the excerpts of Deane’s unpublished memoir prose without any commas or pauses on the page.

“Never pausing for breath! That sort of noirish quality of voice that the Hollywood producer can have that makes me think back to Cain and Chandler and those old Hollywood pulp novels,” the author says.

“Pasquale’s eyes felt heavy and he thought it might be the most intimate thing possible, to fall asleep next to someone in the afternoon,” Walter writes.

“I’m still waiting for my brother to bump me on the head for some of the romantic bits in the book,” Walter says with a laugh. “That was always my challenge, writing an anti-romance. To make that as freighted and heavy as possible so that I would believe that almost fifty years later, when Pasquale found himself in a place where he no longer was married, he would really go back and try finding this woman.”

“In a way,” Walter adds, “romance is its own thing, a kind of unrealized potential. The most romantic part of things is often the beginning because its energy hasn’t been played out yet.”

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter is published by Harper ($19.99). Walter will appear at the IFOA on Oct. 28. For more information, visit readings.org.

So that meeting between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra, in Itay, in 1962?

It’s a truism, if nothing else, to say that it changed their lives forever. Both mega-stars are gone now, with their love, and their two marriages — having long morphed into myth — continuing to be interpreted, diagnosed, emulated and spun into spheres that neither could have possibly imagined at the time. Including, might I add, my just-passed Labour Day long weekend.

Enter: Jess Walters and his elegiac new novel, Beautiful Ruins, which cleverly (and wickedly) is built on the fortress of Taylor-Burton. And which I ate up like a plate of spaghetti alle vongole found in a perfect hole-in-a-wall coursing up from the Piazza Navona. Or something like that.

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For months some of my finer friends (i.e. those who read) have been telling me about this book, and it turns out it’s as wry and as rollickin’ as friend-advertised. The book — written with poise, and in a way that should appeal to both men and women — is not about the infamous Liz & Dick affair in Italy, per se, exactly 50 years ago. More so, it’s about that affair — a 9.5 on the celebrity Richter scale — informing the novel’s backdrop, the fall-out of the love story spilling over into the lives of the novel’s numerous characters, and setting a sweeping dropped-pebble-in-lake effect.

It’s hard to explain, but trust me when I say it’s good. The narrative starts when a mystery starlet, banished from the Rome set of Cleopatra, arrives at an inn situated in an Italian hick town looking out over the incandescent waters of the Ligurian Sea. Doomed heroes and heroines abound as this kaleidoscopic novel shuttles back and forth between fact and fiction, and also that moment hatched in 1962, a modern-day Hollywood right out of an episode of Entourage. And off to Edinburgh and Seattle and so on in the years between.

The surrogacy of celebrity — and how we digest celebrity, too. Those are among the themes of Beautiful Ruins, ones that indubitably resonated with me, what with Toronto spurring into action this week for the annual film festival circus. The impending parade of Ryan Goslings and Kristen Stewarts makes this book almost required reading. In fact, I’m pretty sure Stewart would rather enjoy it — and I would love to get her review of it! Burton — himself a beautiful ruin if there ever was one — shows up in one staggering scene in the novel. And he does what Burton did: He orates. He drinks. He fights the dying of the light. It’s friggin’ amazing.

Post-script: Whilst Googling around after finishing the book, I came across the news that the infamous Welsh thespian’s letters are going to be published later this year, sneak-peeks of which appeared recently in the Daily Mail. One letter, written in 1968 — between the two marriages, hee — has him writing about his Cleopatra in a way few men have ever written about a woman.

“I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth,” Burton begins. “She has turned me into a model man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool. She is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and willful, she is clement and loving.

“She is,” he goes on, “the prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanac for poor Richard. And I shall love her forever.”

Scene! Heard!

Meanwhile:
“Oh my God, I look awful!” That’s Julianne Moore to The Hollywood Reporter, laying it out about the role she just wrapped filming in Toronto as Carrie’s monster-mom. The new film version, as I think I’ve mentioned before, takes more from Stephen King’s original novel than Brian De Palma’s original movie, and the part demanded that Moore really strip down, as it were.

Asked what that experience was like, the venerable actress admitted, “It’s kind of a relief,” going on to muse, “This is my age, this is what I look like without makeup on — who cares? That youth culture — that lying about your age — it’s all denial of death anyway.”

Lindsay Lohan is set to play iconic screen legend Elizabeth Taylor in a new TV movie, Lifetime Television said on Monday, confirming what Lohan has claimed for weeks as she forges ahead with her comeback from legal and personal troubles.

Lohan, 25, is the first name to be announced for Lifetime’s original movie Liz & Dick, based on the true story of Taylor’s passionate romance with actor Richard Burton, whom she married twice throughout her life.

“I have always admired and had enormous respect for Elizabeth Taylor. She was not only an incredible actress but an amazing woman as well,” Lohan said in a statement, adding that she was “honoured” to play the icon.

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Taylor, widely recognized for beauty and glamour, met Burton on the set of the 1963 film Cleopatra, and thus began a passionate and tumultuous romance that made headlines worldwide as they married and divorced twice over the years.

Lohan had talked about her role in the TV movie last month in an interview, and she posted a picture of herself dressed as Taylor as her Twitter profile. But there had been no official confirmation from the network until Monday.

The Mean Girls actress has been striving to turn around her bad girl image in recent months after being in and out of jail, rehab and court since 2007.

She was released in March from almost five years of formal probation stemming from a 2007 drunk driving and cocaine possession arrest. She recently returned to TV sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live and landed a guest spot on Fox’s hit TV musical comedy Glee.

Jennifer Hudson was the first witness to testify in the trial of her ex-brother-in-law, William Balfour, the man accused of murdering her mother, brother and nephew. According to reports, the Oscar winner wept while on the stand, and told the jury that she once warned her sister not to marry Balfour.

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Angelina Jolie travelled to Ecuador as part of a UN visit, where she probably didn’t talk to refugees about her too-fab wedding plans. (Luckily, outlets such as this one have those details covered.)

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Somebody gave Lindsay Lohan a job. After months of speculation, Lohan has reportedly landed the lead role in a Lifetime made-for-TV-movie (about Elizabeth Taylor).

Some time before the cheerleaders and kitty cats walked in, and certainly before the creepy man/woman in the Vanilla Sky mask, a pair of unidentifiables hugged the bar, at which point the voice behind me asked, “Are they ghouls?”

The aforementioned voice in the glam watering hole that is the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, during the just-past Halloween weekend, was attached to one Debbie Reynolds. Sitting in the booth right next to me she was, looking impossibly bemused and about to dig into a Margherita pizza with her machismo-musked, possibly Sicilian seatmate.

I think so, I told Reynolds and her man friend, trying to stare without staring, and keeping my OMG! on ice. At one point — an almost too-good to-be-true moment — the name “Elizabeth Taylor” floated over from the icon’s mouth in a context that I didn’t catch, but that was oh-so-Hollywood, given her starring role in the Brangelina scandal of another jewelled era when she, the American sweetheart, was left for the temptress that was La Liz by her then-scoundral-of-a-husband, Eddie Fisher.

Full points for serendipity? Half, perhaps. In some ways the central casting was not unexpected given the plush-ness of our cocoon, this storied ground zero where the L.A. list is A-, and the traffic of a certain wattage.

Nestled at the bottom of Rodeo Drive in the art nouveau hotel sometimes just known as the “Pink Palace,” the Polo Lounge has sparkled both in movies (scenes set in The Way We Were, Shampoo, American Gigolo, etc.) and its life-imitation (a magnet for everyone from Dunaway to Kidman to, naturally, the Rat Pack, who basically lived in this joint). At some point or another on this particular night — after yet more ghouls had arrived — Debbie flashed a smile, said bye (she said bye!), and walked toward the door, showing off then a pretty short-short skirt and legs that were more/less as striking as they were when she was kicking up storms in Singin’ In the Rain.

OK, then.

Some additionally nice leg work — but less ghastly costuming — was what I caught just a little earlier in the eve at the hotel when I attended this year’s down-to-the-wire for the Dorchester Collection Fashion Prize. An award conceived by the swish hotel group that includes The Bev Hills, it’s a competition with US$40,000 at stake, plus a chance for an emerging designer to show their work in the fame Hotel Plaza Athénée during next year’s Paris Fashion Week.

Fairly intimate, and buzz-hoisted by Chandon Rosé, the live fashion show/event drew a haute judging panel consisting of such names as Francisco Costa, Calvin Klein’s creative director, Georgina Chapman and Keren Craig of Marchesa, author and gadabout Derek Blasberg, society swan Lauren Santo Domingo, and Vanity Fair’s Elizabeth Saltzman. The runway itself, consisting of looks all the four finalists, had a built-in déjà vu factor, owing to the taping that America’s Next Top Model was doing of the proceedings!

As the Dorchester Collection Prize’s chairperson, the Toronto-bred Bronwyn Cosgrave, told us, some minutes in, there was a reason we’d be seeing each outfit go down … well, twice. “For the cameras!” she said.

Twice the fun on the runway — and two winners, ultimately. After all was said and adjudicated, and more Rosé was enjoyed, two too-cute Mexican sisters named Phoebe and Annette Stephens grabbed the mantel. And in a surprise to some, the prize went to designers who do mainly jewellery — Aztec-inspired, at that. Watch this name, brand-wise: Anndra Neen. Hot, hot, hot. They’re gonna be big — that ’twas the final verdict from my pal, Bronwyn, who is not only the one-woman operator behind this relatively new Dorchester honour, but is one of the brainiest sorts circulating in fashion these days. Once an editor at British Vogue, her book, Made for Each Other, on the history of Oscar fashion, was well-received, and she has — oh! — so many other schemes on the go.

A no-brainer. That’s what, I should point out, the brainiac told us about The Beverly Hills being as backdrop to this year’s prize. As she reminded me, style has long been a part of its allure. Like, for instance, the time that Marlene Dietrich inadvertently ended up changing the Polo Lounge’s “no slacks for ladies” policy when she turned up there one day in trousers.

And then there is the oft-told story, as well — here in the place where the posing comes naturally — about the time Katharine Hepburn once dove into the hotel’s famed Olympic-size pool. Fully clothed.

For a second straight year Michael Jackson is the world’s top dead earner, according to a macabre list compiled by Forbes magazine of stars whose earning power remains undiminished beyond the grave.

The King of Pop, who died two years ago at the age of 50, brought in US$170-million for his estate over the past 12 months, enough to place him ahead of every other pop music act of the past year — both living and dead — except for Irish rock band U2.

Elvis came in second place, earning US$55-million, thanks to his evergreen songbook and a hit Las Vegas stage production featuring his tunes mounted by Cirque de Soleil. In third place was movie siren Marilyn Monroe, who had US$27-million in earnings over the past year.

While much of Lennon’s revenues came as payment from other musicians performing his music, Taylor’s largely came from her best-selling perfume White Diamonds. The fragrance had gross sales of US$54-million in the United States in 2010, according to industry experts cited by Forbes.

Taylor’s estate also appears likely to net handsomely from a December sale later this year by the Christie’s auction house featuring the late actress’s jewels, art work and gowns. Experts said it could fetch US$30-million.

By the time Arthur Mendonça’s collection hits the runway, the evening’s already 45 minutes behind schedule and this gives rise to few quibbles and grumbles from the crowd. In recent years, LG Fashion Week has been a moveable beast that alights for a season or two in a space (a nightclub, an historic CNE building, a different public square), usually just long enough to work out the kinks before moving again. More kinks ensue, etc etc. This time, the attendees on site for long days enjoy actual toilets instead of porta-lets but apparently, those washrooms in nearby Metro Hall food court close daily at 8pm. Meaning? Eschew the free Peroni beer drink tickets on offer after dusk, or make an emergency trip to the nearby Tim Horton’s before the late final show.

The front row boasts boldface: Yasmine Warsame, Jully Black, Keshia Chanté, Stacy McKenzie (in that furry IZMA gown of last season). There too is Abby Beker, the head of Beker Fashions, the backer and manufacturer of Mendonça’s collection (and of Wayne Clark’s) – and the gregarious 84-year-old seems to know everyone. While waiting for the stragglers to settle, my seat mates and I chuckle at the typo in the official LG programme that blogger Anita Clarke has been tweeting to our attention. A pull-quote from a Toronto fashion writer is writ large but misprinted to say that Canadian chic is not “an oxmoron.” I’m still waiting on the official Canadian Oxford Dictionary of Fashion definition for that…

Mendonça’s line sheet says his spring collection was inspired by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Well, that Cleo was a spoiled Egyptian princess (and spoiled Hollywood star). For Joseph Mankiewitz’s 1963 Technicolour extravaganza, wardrober Renié spent a reported $194,000 of the film’s budget on Taylor’s elaborate costumes, including a dress made of 24-carat-gold-cloth, plus 64 other costume changes. Production went so over budget that it nearly bankrupted Fox studios. Thankfully for Beker, Mendonça exercises more restraint. Everything is extremely well-finished but overall, understated. Even the fabrics, some of which are custom designed.

The show opens with a tweedy oatmeal linen dress that has generous patch pockets and a raw hem, then a peplum jacket in the same, only it’s piped in black and has the scuba effect of early 1990s Chanel. More of the wetlook hair (c.f. Greta Constantine) on the models, who are wearing blouses and dresses with shoulders and yokes of ruched chiffon (like shirred drapery sheers), and a silky black print depicting red and fuchsia floral bouquets.

There are several collarless jackets — 20th century power suiting with the added clever, 21st century practicality of zip-off peplums. The fabrics all have something textural going on: one is a structured bronze jacquard; a pair of paints is shiny blue, paired with a yellow silk blouse; another is an almost tribal woodgrain pattern of cream and brown. The Egyptian princess is in the details: a boatneck sheath in creamy crepe with a single stripe of earthy brown; slim off-white trousers with satin-trimmed pockets and waistbands or for après office, swishy silk dresses with a deep, asymmetric keyhole cutout at the neck. For Egyptian flavour, there are collar necklaces with pyramid pendants, and the like.

After a few floaty persimmon and mocha silk dresses, androgynous male model Andrej Pejic emerges wearing a slouchy trouser and jacket that’s zoot-suit-meets-David-Bowie, and then, the finale: A caftan, in flyaway silk more sheer and fluid than the patterned ones Taylor favoured off-screen — but then that was nearly fifty years ago.

“I like to quote fictional characters,” says Carrie Fisher, after citing Sherlock Holmes on the amount of information it’s possible for one person to hold in his head “because I’m something of a fictional character myself.” I wish she’d gone into that a bit more. Wishful Drinking, an in-person memoir of Fisher’s life as Hollywood child and bipolar adult, is a kind of psychological striptease. It’s entertaining and revealing, but never quite enough of either.

Or it’s like visiting someone, enjoying the house and appreciating the welcome, but never getting to know the hostess. Fisher’s set does actually approximate a living room, furnished with mementoes of her past, including a R2-D2 or two: As she says herself, if we don’t remember her as Princess Leia in Star Wars, then what are we doing there? Just to remind us, she appears before us in full bunnish Leia hairstyle (“my face was too wide, so of course they made it look wider”), and with glitter dripping from her eyelashes. She’s also singing: an ironic, Streisand-ish version of Happy Days are Here Again, which she does pretty well; even, after a tantalizing pause in which we wonder whether she’ll have to fake it, hitting the last high note. But then her parents were both singers.

We hear a lot about Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds in the show’s first act. Their photos occupy the top left-hand corner on a board labelled Hollywood Inbreeding 101; Fisher (Carrie, that is) stands in front of it with a pointer, guiding us through the intricate saga of marriages, divorces, and — amazingly frequently — re-marriages: Eddie and Debbie, Elizabeth and Mike, Eddie and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Richard, plus any number of other players more rich than famous. It goes on for rather longer than its stage-worthiness deserves; the mock-schoolteacher manner begins to grate. There are some fun bits, though. We learn that Papa Eddie, before his death, took up with “most of Chinatown” and that Mama still lives next door and phones regularly, gruffly announcing herself as “your mother, Debbie.” Well, her daughter makes her sound gruff.

She obviously loved and loves her parents. All the same, we’re left in no doubt that, however titillating it may seem in retrospect, it was a childhood certain to cause problems later. Although how much it contributed to Fisher’s alcoholism, substance abuse and (conceivably) her mental illness — the main subjects of the show’s second act — is never examined in much detail. They just sort of happen.

The show abounds in missing links. We learn that young Carrie studied in London at the Central School of Speech and Drama, where for the only time in her life she could be just another person. She does a very funny run-down of the tongue-twisting vocal exercises she learned there, and an even funnier riff on how they might have melded with the immortal prose she was called upon to deliver as Princess Leia.

How George Lucas came to think of her for the role, all untried as she was, is not revealed; but since she portrays Lucas as the ultimate sphinx, it could be that he never let on. Maybe he thought that to play a princess, you cast a princess, or at least a scion of Hollywood royalty. Fisher pokes some scathing, if presumably affectionate, fun at the film and her role in it (though as I recall she wasn’t half-bad), without ever making the connection to what came after. She emerged, especially when she started writing, as more talented and intelligent than anyone had given her credit for. That must have been a blast. In this show, it’s taken for granted.

Instead we hear about her marriages, especially the two of them that were to Paul Simon: the union of two smart, mismatched and — we deduce — incorrigibly optimistic people. And then there are the depths: “I’ve got prizes for mental illness”, she tells us — adding “because I’m so good at it.” (She’s also good, as you may have noted, at wry, deflationary one-liners.) She’s actually very enlightening on what it feels like to be bipolar, without telling us very much about how and when it actually happened to her.

That’s not the only double bluff. She ponders the possibility of her doing “a pandering, audience-pleasing show — like this one.” That’s cute, without actually being disarming. Her own audience-pleasing (or audience-baiting) tactics include picking out spectators by name and repeatedly coming back to them, Edna Everage style. She also drags one punter — male — on stage, apparently to make love to an unco-operative Princess Leia doll. However willing the participant, this kind of thing always strikes me as bullying: people with stage skills — and Fisher seems very at home up there — exploiting those without.

The show’s title is neat but a cheat. Compared with some of her other problems, Fisher’s drinking is glossed over. There is, though, a double whammy of an ending. We see a projected headline paying tribute to “Bipolar Woman of the Year,” with a subhead that seems to confirm all the star’s most endearing self-doubts: “Carrie Fisher Runner Up.” It’s followed by another headline that I couldn’t read, so transfixed was I by the masthead above it: News of the World. Was this a late addition? Fisher says, very soundly, that she hates being described as “a survivor.” All the same, who’s surviving now?

On a frigid January night in 1964, at the luxury George V Hotel in Paris, The Beatles had just received some very good news. Their single, I Want to Hold Your Hand, had reached No. 1 in the United States, and they had been invited to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. For photographer Harry Benson, who had been touring with the band and was in the room when manager Brian Epstein shared the news with the elated musicians, it seemed like the perfect time to suggest a pillow fight.

“When I said it, they said great, but then John Lennon said, ‘No, we don’t want to do it because we’ll look childish and stupid’ ” says Benson in a telephone interview from New York. “But then he slips away, and Paul is drinking whisky or brandy, and John comes up and hits him in the back of the head. That started the whole thing.”

Benson’s photos of The Beatles, from the aforementioned pillow fight to a mock session with boxer Muhammad Ali in 1964, have become some of the most iconic images of all time.

Over the course of his 50-year career, the Glasgow-born photographer, who will be exhibiting his work at Toronto’s Liss Gallery from July 13 to 30, has quietly chronicled some of the world’s most eminent figures, from pop culture to politics.

It was Benson who was standing next to Robert Kennedy when he was shot and killed in 1968; sitting in the same room as Richard Nixon when he resigned in 1974; and allowed to photograph Elizabeth Taylor before and after her brain surgery.

Along the way, Benson, who once aspired to be a goalkeeper for Scotland’s soccer team, has had to adapt to changes in his field as well as celebrity culture. Benson reluctantly made the switch from film to digital seven years ago (“I have got a cupboard full of film cameras … and every time I’ve passed this closet, I hear them shouting, ‘Help!’ ”), but says tolerating today’s celebrities is a far more demanding task.

“The movie stars are a bit dumb,” Benson says. “It’s not to be taken seriously. We haven’t got the stars we used to have — I know I’m talking like an old man — but they aren’t really. There’s no Audrey Hepburns or Liz Taylors about.”

Benson, who was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 2009, is modest about his accomplishments. For a photographer who has captured everyone from Dwight Eisenhower to Martin Luther King, Jr., Benson says he’s only thankful he can continue taking photographs.

“I don’t know what I would have done in my life if I had to work for a living,” he says. “It’s fun. I mean, come on, I [go] around the world taking pictures.”

Harry Benson’s new exhibition launches July 13 at Toronto’s Liss Gallery. For more information, visit harrybenson.com.

Elizabeth Taylor, who died this past March, is ranked seventh on the American Film Institute’s greatest screen legends list — care to know how the legend lived? The actress’ long-time Bel-Air home has come on the market at US$8.6-million, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Owned by Taylor since 1981, the 1960s ranch house with brick motor court sits on 1.27 acres. The 7,000-square-foot home features a wood-beam ceiling and wood-burning fireplace in the living room, which like a sitting room and the dining room, can access the pool terrace. A galley-style kitchen, powder room, a master suite, two other bedrooms, maid’s quarters, an office and a bathroom with sauna complete the downstairs. Another master suite is upstairs for a total of five bedrooms. The grounds include the pool with spa, terraced gardens, trails and a koi pond with waterfall.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, but boy is it fun to envision. According to Vanity Fair, the three were all in New York City on 9/11, and, unable to flee the city due to airport closures, they did the only logical thing: Hopped in a car together and set off for Ohio!

A former employee of Michael Jackson’s says that Michael, like General Washington, led his entourage to a temporary safe haven in New Jersey, before the three superstars took to the open road. “They actually got as far as Ohio—all three of them, in a car they drove themselves!” he recalls. Brando allegedly annoyed his traveling companions by insisting on stopping at nearly every KFC and Burger King they passed along the highway. One can only imagine the shock their appearance caused at gas stations and rest stops across America.

A close friend of Elizabeth Taylor denies the story, claiming that Taylor instead ventured out to Ground Zero, but her denial doesn’t matter because you already have a mental image of MJ, Liz Taylor and Marlon Brando at a KFC takeout window.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/did-michael-jackson-liz-taylor-and-marlon-brando-go-on-a-road-trip-together/feed0stdWe wonder who rode shotgunElizabeth Taylor was late for her own funeralhttp://news.nationalpost.com/arts/elizabeth-taylor-was-late-for-her-own-funeral
http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/elizabeth-taylor-was-late-for-her-own-funeral#commentsFri, 25 Mar 2011 22:30:54 +0000http://arts.nationalpost.com/?p=28533

Film icon Elizabeth Taylor was laid to rest Thursday in the same celebrity cemetery as her long-time friend Michael Jackson — and demonstrated a keen sense of humour to the end.

The legendary actress, who died Wednesday aged 79, was sent off with an hour-long private ceremony at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where generations of Hollywood stars are buried.

But her last wishes were respected, and announced after the service had finished.

“The service was scheduled to begin at 2:00 p.m., but at Miss Taylor’s request started late,” said a statement by her publicist.

“Miss Taylor had left instructions that it was to begin at least 15 minutes later than publicly scheduled, with the announcement: ‘She even wanted to be late for her own funeral,’ ” it added.

The film legend and violet-eyed beauty, famed as much for her stormy love life as her five-decade Oscar-winning film career, died early Wednesday from congestive heart failure at Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai hospital.

Tributes poured in from Hollywood and beyond for the actress, who won two Oscars — including for the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — and was arguably the last great star of cinema’s golden era.

But Thursday’s funeral was reserved for a few dozen family and friends, brought in a fleet of black stretch limos to the verdant cemetery, where stars including Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, and Jean Harlow are also interred.

Irish actor Colin Farrell — a “close friend” — gave a recital of the Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, while other readings were done by her children and grandchildren, said her publicist.

Taylor’s grandson Rhys Tivey performed a trumpet solo of Amazing Grace, while Rabbi Jerry Cutler officiated at a “multi-denominational” service. Taylor converted to Judaism when she was in her twenties.

Forest Lawn is where Jackson was buried following his death in June 2009 aged 50, from an overdose of the powerful sedative propofol. Taylor attended that private ceremony.

During their lives, the pop icon and Hollywood legend were at times inseparable, with homes near each other in the plush Bel Air and Beverly Hills neighborhoods west of Hollywood.

“I don’t think anyone knew how much we loved each other,” Taylor said after his death. “I loved Michael with all my soul and I can’t imagine life without him. We had so much in common and we had such loving fun together.”

The TMZ celebrity news website published a copy of Taylor’s death certificate, which gave Forest Lawn as the burial location.

The certificate listed her causes of death as: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which it said she had for 10 years; congestive heart failure, which she had for five years; and cardiopulmonary arrest, against which was noted five minutes.
In tribute to Taylor, the association representing New York’s Broadway theaters said they will dim their lights Friday in remembrance of the Hollywood goddess, whose long career included spells on the stage.

At the same time it emerged that ailing actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, 94, had been rushed to hospital after hearing the news of Taylor’s death.

“She was watching the news yesterday morning, she was inconsolable. She said to her husband: ‘Celebrities always go in threes, we’ve had Jane Russell, now it’s Elizabeth, I’m next,’ ” said her spokesman.

Rebel Without a Cause screen legend James Dean was molested by his childhood minister, according to an interview with Elizabeth Taylor published Friday.

Hollywood icon Taylor, who died this week aged 79, revealed Dean’s secret in an interview given 14 years ago, but requested that it not be published until after her death.

“I loved Jimmy. I’m going to tell you something, but it’s off the record until I die. OK?” best-selling author Kevin Sessums quoted Taylor as saying, in the interview published by the Daily Beast online.

“When Jimmy was 11 and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot.

“During Giant we’d stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me,” she said, referring to the movie in which Taylor and Dean co-starred.

Dean died in a car crash in 1955 at age 24, shortly after making Rebel Without a Cause, in which he played Jim Stark, a teenager with a troubled past arriving in a new town.

He was nominated for two posthumous Oscars — for East of Eden in 1956 and Giant in 1957.

Taylor died Wednesday from congestive heart failure, and was buried Thursday in the Forest Lawn celebrity cemetery near Los Angeles, resting place to generations of stars including her long-time friend, pop icon Michael Jackson.

From The Jewish Daily Forward
Whereas Judaism, unlike some other religions, discourages conversions, there has always been a certain amount of giddy excitement when a star, from Marilyn Monroe to Sammy Davis Jr., converts to the Jewish faith. Few, if any, such conversions, however, made the lasting impact of the ceremony at Hollywood’s Temple Israel on March 27, 1959, at which a 27-year old Elizabeth Taylor took the Hebrew name Elisheba Rachel and converted to Judaism.

Although some ridiculed this decision by Taylor, who died in the early morning of March 23 at age 79, she took it utterly seriously. Biographer Kitty Kelley quotes Taylor as stating: “I felt terribly sorry for the suffering of the Jews during the war. I was attracted to their heritage. I guess I identified with them as underdogs.”

Tellingly, Taylor had not converted before or during her marriage to Jewish film producer Mike Todd (born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen), but instead achieved her goal nearly one year after Todd’s premature death in an airplane crash. In order to do so, she studied with Temple Israel’s Rabbi Max Nussbaum, a Bukovina-born Holocaust survivor who had led that congregation from 1942 onward.

A portrait of Hollywood actress Elizabeth Taylor by Andy Warhol will go under the hammer in New York on May 12 and is expected to fetch as much as US$30-million, auctioneers Phillips de Pury said on Thursday.

Liz #5 was painted in 1963 and is “a dazzling tribute to Elizabeth Taylor,” the auction house said in a statement.

Taylor died on Wednesday aged 79.

Liz #5 is a pristine gem,” said Michael McGinnis, head of contemporary art at Phillips de Pury.

“It is Warhol at his very best with a perfect screen, glowing colors, and impeccable provenance. She is classic yet every bit as cutting edge as she was when Warhol painted her nearly 50 years ago.”

According to the company, the portrait “embodies the most important themes of Warhol’s oeuvre including celebrity, wealth, scandal, sex, death and Hollywood.

“The epitome of old-world Hollywood style and glamour, Liz Taylor was one of Warhol’s most famous inspirations alongside Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy.”

The painting is estimated to be worth US$20- to US$30-million.

British actor Hugh Grant sold a Warhol portrait of Taylor in New York in 2007 for US$23.6-million, several times what he paid for the work.